In a communication system, a transmitter transmits data to a receiver over a communication medium in the presence of noise. The noise alters the data and, if the alteration is severe enough, the receiver may be unable to recover the data as originally transmitted. Two major types of noise that are common to communication systems include Additive White Gaussian Noise (AWGN) and burst noise.
AWGN is characterized by the fact that it is stationary in time and contains equal power within any frequency band with a fixed width. Because of these attributes, the energy level of AWGN can be predicted fairly accurately and used to tune parameters of a receiver to compensate for its corruptive effects to a signal received by the receiver. Burst noise, on the other hand, may be non-stationary in time and typically lasts only for a short period of time (e.g., less than 100 microseconds). During the short period of time that it typically occurs, burst noise may be significantly stronger than AWGN. The non-stationary nature and strong noise level of burst noise during short periods of time make it difficult to tune parameters of a receiver to compensate for its corruptive effects to a signal received by the receiver. However, in order to provide a required performance level in terms of, for example, data rate and packet error ratio, a receiver may need to detect burst noise so that errors in the data it receives that are caused by burst noise can be corrected.
The embodiments of the present disclosure will be described with reference to the accompanying drawings. The drawing in which an element first appears is typically indicated by the leftmost digit(s) in the corresponding reference number.